Bot net operator caught

An operator of bot networks was arrested, in a case where the investigators got the upper hand. Many computers, mostly running the Windows operating system have countless hidden security holes which may be exploited by anyone from the North Korean government, to a small town bot army enthusiast. The key point in this case is that computer security is paramount, and the root cause is often not identified. Operating systems produced without transparency, that is the code is compiled so you cant actually read it, will always have a perpetual source of security vulnerabilities.

Only operating systems with source code released to the public have shown to be secure, a lesson well learned by most running servers.

A 20-year-old Australian man has been charged with infecting more than 3,000 computers around the world with a virus designed to capture banking and credit card data, police said Thursday.

The man, whose name will not be released until he appears in an Adelaide court on Sept. 4, has been charged with several computer offenses that carry prison terms of up to 10 years, South Australia state police Detective Supt. Jim Jeffery said in a statement.

Police also uncovered information that will identify other offenders, Jeffery said.

The man, who lives in the state capital, Adelaide, is also accused of illegally creating a capacity to disable computer systems by bombarding them with unwanted traffic from up to 74,000 computers he controlled around the world. This type of sabotage is known as a distributed denial of service attack.

Police have not said whether the man allegedly used stolen banking information to commit identity fraud.

The arrest followed a three-month investigation involving state and federal computer crime detectives.

With a network like that, one could cause quite a stir.

Gwibber Linux microblogging and Twitter

One of the latest contenders in the Linux twitter arena is Gwibber. It is an open source microblogging client for GNOME developed with Python and GTK. The program supports Twitter, Jaiku, Facebook, Pownce, Identi.ca and other popular social web services.

But then let’s face it, Twitter’s not the only micro-blogging platform out there, and it’s definitely not the only program that lets you have status updates. That’s why having a Twitter-only client doesn’t really make a whole lot of sense. I was using Twitux before, but since then I joined a fully open-source micro-blogging platform called Identi.ca. Probably by virtue of being open-source software, it has a large Linux-user population, so I had to join. And Twitux doesn’t work with it. Enter Gwibber.

Gwibber is a status-update client for a lot of services. I’m just using it for Twitter and Identi.ca, but it also works for Digg, Jaiku, Facebook, Pownce, and Flickr. It’s actively developed, and the developer (Ryan Paul of ArsTechnica) seems to be listening to user input, so that’s definitely a plus.

Right now, though, I just really like its flexibility. It uses WebKit for rendering, so it can get pretty fancy. Take a look at the screenshot below. I configured it to use dark blue for Identi.ca updates and light blue for Twitter updates, so they match each site’s theme. You can pick whatever color you want for each, but I thought it was easier to remember this way.

Please note, though, that Gwibber is still in Alpha. I haven’t noticed any issues with it, but being alpha software does mean there are big changes happening fairly often. I think duplicate detection was added last week. I’m with everyone that’s requesting a “Replies” tab. Ryan says he’ll make it a priority.

Delete files by age on Linux

Often it might be necessary to remove files older than a certain age on a Linux machine. This uses the bash programming language which is native to most Linux distributions. It can be run on a regular basis by scheduling it with the crontab, or run once to clean out old files. The time variable can be changed to suit the user’s needs, more examples can be found at the Save Lono software engineering help site.

This script removes every *.wav file older then one minute in the directory it is executed. This script is very useful and can be used with the cron daemon for regular file removal.

#!/bin/bash

find ./*.wav -type f -mmin +1 -exec rm {} \;

Also we can adjust this for days rather than minutes by changing ‘-mmin +1′ to ‘-mtime +10′. This would delete .wav files in the working directory that were older than 10 days.

More Information
provided by SaveLono.com
http://www.savelono.com/

NEC, Panasonic and Motorola release phones using LiMo Linux

More phones have been released by NEC, Panasonic and Motorola that employ the linux operating system. These phones seem to be more feature phone than smartphone. The market for software platforms on cellphones is led by Nokia’s Symbian operating system, but it has lost much ground over the last year to Apple and BlackBerry maker Research in Motion Ltd.

Computer operating system Linux has had the most success with servers sofar, but its role is increasing with the LiMo platform and Google is using Linux for its Android platform.

Linux is the most popular type of free or so-called open source computer operating system available to the public to be used, revised and shared. Linux suppliers earn money selling improvements and technical services and Linux competes directly with Microsoft Corp, which charges for its Windows software and opposes freely sharing its code.

A feature phone, at least by my definition, may have a number of very exciting features, but you cannot add functionality to your phone by installing apps, other than what someone may have written in Java. Those type of apps are usually games. A smart phone would be based on a platform that is intended to be expanded with third party apps, can sync with the cloud and has a rich set of development tools for developers.

LiMo also said Japanese mobile carrier KDDI Corp and touch screen company Immersion Corp had joined the not-for-profit foundation. But LiMo has been missing support from the largest cellphone vendors. So far smaller phone makers NEC, Panasonic and Motorola Inc have unveiled in total 42 phones using its software. At the same time, all the top handset vendors, except Nokia, have promised to produce phone models running Android software.

The world’s second- and third-largest cellphone vendors, Samsung Electronics Co Ltd and LG Electronics Inc, are members of LiMo, but have not unveiled commercial models.

LiMo hopes to benefit from its focus on giving greater say over software development to telecommunications operators. Its key members — Vodafone Group Plc, France Telecom SA’s Orange, Japan’s NTT DoCoMo Inc, South Korea’s SK Telecom Co Ltd, Telefonica SA and U.S. operator Verizon Wireless, a venture between Verizon Communications In and Vodafone — have pledged to introduce LiMo phones in 2009.

Opera Link Saves Personal Information Remotely

Firefox Web Browser speed boost with pipelining

To speed up the FireFox web browser with an extra boost, settings can be changed in the configuration settings. Several data channels may be opened at once to increase the throughput on http transactions. For most people browsing the web this modification might not give too much of an increase, unless there are several data transfers going on at the same time.

In the address bar, type about:config to get to the internal options.

Address Bar > about:config

To find a setting, copy it from below and enter it into the url bar. Change the setting to the values listed and firefox will be enabled to run more quickly than default with open pipelines.

Pipelining set to true

network.http.pipelining –change to–> true
network.http.pipelining.maxrequests –change to–> 8
network.http.proxy.pipelining –change to–> true